This is the standard Tidy object constructor. Except for the new 'binary' option, it can take the same parameters as an XML::XPath object constructor to initialize the XML document object. These can be any one of:

The tidy() member function can take a single optional parameter as the string that should be inserted for each indent level. Some examples:

# Tidy up indenting with default two (2) spaces per indent level
$tidy_obj->tidy();
# Tidy up indenting with four (4) spaces per indent level
$tidy_obj->tidy(' ');
# Tidy up indenting with one (1) tab per indent level
$tidy_obj->tidy("\t");

The default behavior is to use two (2) spaces for each indent level. The Tidy object gets all mixed-content (i.e., non-data) text nodes reformatted to appropriate indent levels according to tree nesting depth.

NOTE: tidy() disturbs some XML escapes in whatever ways XML::XPath does. It has been brought to my attention that these modules also strip CDATA tags from XML files / data they operate on. Even though CDATA tags don't seem very common, I wish they could work smoothly too. Hopefully the vast majority of files will work fine && support for other types can be added later.

The compress() member function calls strip() on the Tidy object then creates an encoded comment which contains the names of elements && attributes as they occurred in the original document. Their respective element && attribute names are replaced with just the appropriate index throughout the document.

compress() can accept a parameter describing which node types to attempt to shrink down as abbreviations. This parameter should be a string of just the first letters of each node type you wish to include as in the following mapping:

Attribute values ('v') && text nodes ('t') both seem to work fine with current tokenization. I've still labeled them EXPERIMENTAL because they seem more likely to cause problems than valid element or attribute key names. I have some bugs in the comment node compression which I haven't been able to find yet so that one should be avoided for now. Since these three node types ('vtc') all require tokenization, they are not included in default compression ('ea'). An example call which includes values && text would be:

$tidy_obj->compress('eavt');

The original document structure (i.e., node hierarchy) is preserved. compress() significantly reduces the file size of most XML documents for when size matters more than immediate human readability. expand() performs the opposite conversion.

The bcompress() member function stores a binary representation of any Tidy object. The format consists of:

0) a null-terminated version string
1) a byte specifying how many bytes later indices will be
2) the number of bytes from 1 above to designate the total string count
3) the number of null-terminated strings from 2 above
4) the number of bytes from 1 above to designate the total integer count
5) the number of 4-byte integers from 4 above
6) the number of bytes from 1 above to designate the total float count
7) the number of 8-byte (double-precision) floats from 6 above
8) node index sets until the end of the file

Normal node index sets consist of two values. The first is an index (again the number of bytes long comes from 1) into the three lists as if they were all linear. The second is a single-byte integer identifying the node type (using standard DOM node type enumerations).

A few special cases exist in node index sets though. If the index is null, it is interpreted as a close-element tag (so no accompanying type value is read). On the other end, when the index is non-zero, the type value is always read. In the event that the type corresponds to an attribute or a processing instruction, the next index is read (without another accompanying type value) in order to complete the data fields required by those node types.

NOTE: Please bear in mind that the encoding of binary integers && floats only works properly if the values are not surrounded by spaces or other delimiters && each is contained in its own single node. This is necessary to enable thorough reconstruction of whitespace from the original document. I recommend storing every numerical value as an isolated attribute value or text node without any surrounding whitespace.

The write() member function can take an optional filename parameter to write out any changes to the Tidy object. If no parameters are given, write() overwrites the original XML document file (if a 'filename' parameter was given to the constructor).

write() will croak() if no filename can be found to write to.

write() can also take a secondary parameter which specifies an XPath location to be written out as the new root element instead of the Tidy object's root. Only the first matching element is written.

The toString() member function is almost identical to write() except that it takes no parameters && simply returns the equivalent XML string as a scalar. It is a little weird because normally only XML::XPath::Node objects have a toString() member but I figure it makes sense to extend the same syntax to the parent object as well since it is a useful option.

Most source code should be Free! Code I have lawful authority over is && shall be! Copyright: (c) 2004-2011, Pip Stuart. Copyleft : This software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (version 3). Please consult the Free Software Foundation (HTTP://FSF.Org) for important information about your freedom.